Nero : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

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Nero is a German company that makes a large number of small programs useful for
creating CD (Compact Disc) s, DVD (Digital Video Disc)
s and Blu-Ray disks. Some of the programs are useful for video editing. Nero then
bundles these programs up in various ways with a non-descriptive name. Each year they
rename all the bundles and change just which features they include. The website gives
only the sketchiest and abstract description of what each program does. Happily they
have a try before you buy policy so you can try out programs to make sure they have
the features you need.

The main complaint I have with Nero is the menus are dripping with features that
you would almost never use. This make finding the options you do want quite
difficult. The progress displays are designed to entertain a technogeek, not the
average user who just wants to know how much longer until the work is done.

My other main complaint is the utilities are not designed to be used unattended in
a bat file. You must shepherd them step by step with the GUI (Graphic User Interface).
I see this as the programmers being too much in love with his creation and cannot
bear the thought of anyone using it unattended and un-fully appreciated in the
background.

Every few months Nero, repackages its code into different bundles and renames
everything. I gather this is a way of making people buy packages anew rather that
getting/expecting free upgrades.

Nero is chaotic about version numbers. Each product a version number on the
website, one on the about box and yet another in the XML (extensible Markup Language)
used to detect the need for automatic updates. To say the least, this is
confusing.

I count about a dozen minor errors in the part of the free program that copies a
CD. I have twice reported these to Nero and they have just jerked me around
pretending not to understand and needing to know irrelevant things like my maternal
grandmother’s maiden name (I exaggerate) before they can fix it. You can still
use it, but you have to ignore the prompts. That degree of sloppiness bothers me. It
is as though they never tested the program even once on a naïve
user. You should be able to trust the prompts to tell you what to do. Further, if the
disc is badly scratched it just gives up. It will not copy what it can.

Nero 2014 Multimedia Suite

This includes video editing, burning and backup. Prices are currently shown in
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Nero Burning ROM 12

Version 15.0.02700Last revised/verified:2013-10-21.
This is a very complete program for burning CD
s, DVDs (Digital Video Discs)
and Blu-Ray discs in every format known to man, including a proprietary format that
records redundant information to help in recovery from damaged discs. The designed it
to be compatible with ordinary formats. You need to use a utility to access the
recovery information if you have trouble. They put a copy on each
DVD.

You can create a constellation file, so you don’t have to specify which
directories to burn every time. They support over a dozen different constellation
formats. Run NeroCmd.exe to learn the command line
options.

I found one minor bug. It would not let me embed the date in the disc label in
ISO (International Standards Organisation)
YYYY-MM-DD format. It looks as if it intended to, but it failed.

$50.00 CAD

If you upgrade a from a free product it is much cheaper.

Nero 2014 BackItUp

$30.00 CAD

You’d think this should be more expensive than Nero Burning
ROM, but Burning
ROM is considerably
more complicated. This program is specialised to handle the problem of backing up
files. It can handle spilling over onto multiple CD
s. It has built-in compression. It can restore system files and entire partitions. I
don’t see any mention of constellations.

Nero Media Home

The program is currently called Nero Media Home.
I have not experimented with the most recent incarnation. The previous one was an insult.
.
Before that it was called Nero KwikMedia. Before that Nero Quick Burn. Before that it
was called Nero BurnLite. Before that it was called
Nero Lite. BurnLite was the best
incarnation. The current one does things other than backup and hence takes
much longer to start. The big attraction is it is
free. Unfortunately it no longer does anthing useful. It just offers
to sell you some product any time you ask it to do something. You have to buy two
$5.00 CAD
add-ons before it does anything useful.

A company has every right to convert a formerly free product to a pay one, however,
they do not have the right to sneakily destroy somone’s copy of the free
version without their permission. That is theft.

It can backup files to DVD and CD
s. It is pure GUI,
no command line control, no configurations. It is very simple to use, something you
could give your grandmother. It has no geekish clutter. It creates a bit-map image of
the DVD on hard disk, a
chunk as a time as it is burning. This way it does not need 5Gb of free space to run. As it is creating the first chunk, this
process it looks as if nothing is happening. I thought it has crashed the first time
I used it. The progress indicators are confusing It does not make a noise to let you
know it has completed. You have to notice visually and click exit. I find this
annoying, since I usually leave my computer to hum when it is doing backups. Once the
program is loaded, it backs up quite quickly. You cannot use it unattended. For
alternatives, see CD
burning.

At one point it rudely insisted on installing the Ask toolbar. You could get rid
of it later with the control panel. Now it just tries to trick you into installing
unrelated junk. Make sure you select custom during the
install, or you won’t get to select the install drive. It sets up two items in
the control panel uninstall. That is normal. There was a bug that I reported twice
that survived half a dozen updates that if you clicked options, it would crash. They finally corrected it on 2011-11-16. If it stops working, uninstall, manually delete all Nero
directories, scrub the registry of dangling entries, reboot and install from scratch
with a freshly downloaded version. If it says ATL100.DLL is
missing, you must install the Visual
C++ 2010 32 bit runtime. It has two larger brothers Unlimited at
€10.00 EUR
and Unlimited Blu-Ray at
€40.00 EUR
.

After the Crash

After a crash, you will have to download a new copy of Nero KwikMedia or get one
from backup. Depending on the severity of the crash, it may ask you for a serial
number. You can’t get this from the program. You have to either have written it
down when you purchased something, or first installed it, or by downloading and
running NeroSerialFinder. Start Nero
KwikMedia, login and magically the add-ons you bought previously will download and
install themselves. You don’t even have to click activate. The burned discs, at least ones where all the data fit on
one disc, can be read without Nero software. The disadvantage of this is there is no
compression.